Great Consultations: Successful alumni learned by being student consultants

Whether they decided ultimately to pursue a career in consulting or not, Broad School alumni who have been student consultants call it a great learning ground where they had the chance to gain hands-on experience, develop team-building skills, and solve real-world business problems. Both MBA students and Broad School undergraduates have their own studentrun consulting groups: Spartan Consulting, Inc., and Students Consulting for Nonprofit Organizations (SCNO), respectively.

Each group is organized differently and has slightly different goals, but alumni of the groups say remarkably similar things about the challenges they faced and the experiences they gained from their student consulting days. And it seems that the most important learning that happens for student consultants is what they learn about themselves. As Tim Keneally (MBA ’00), a former Spartan consultant and now a manager for Capgemini says, “A student consulting experience gives you the opportunity to know whether this is something you really want to do.”

Spartan Consulting: embracing risk

Keneally had an ideal background for consulting when he came to the Broad School. He already had operations experience in manufacturing, managing one of the packaging lines for consumer goods giant Fort James Corporation. He knew he could relate well to what was happening on the factory floor and was adept at finding ways to make processes more efficient. He came to the Broad School to get an MBA that would take him to the next level.

“Spartan Consulting helped me gain experience for my resume, but consulting is not for everybody,” he says. “A good example of this is a project we had working with senior level executives who wanted a detailed new strategy for one of their processes. They expected a lot from us, maybe too much… ultimately, we were successful, but it was a hard lesson in time management and in understanding how to meet client expectations.”

Keneally came to campus this fall to share his experiences with MBAs in Spartan Consulting. His advice? “Just take on one consulting project a semester,” he says. “Not every student can work on every project, and you are really better off doing a good job on just one thing, than trying to do everything and have it not go well.”

Robert Nason (MS ’64, PhD ’68), chair of the Broad School Marketing and Supply Chain Management Department and Spartan Consulting advisor, agrees. “Beyond the hands-on experience that the students get from a consulting organization, making the commitment to solve a business problem and to deliver on that promise — really teaches them about taking responsibility and assuming risk,” he says.

A decade of student consulting

According to Nason, the impetus to form Spartan Consulting came in the late 1980s from MBA-marketing concentration students who wanted practice in consulting. “Whenever a small project came up, we would send it their way,” he says. Gradually, as the scope of the projects broadened, students from other concentrations and backgrounds were needed. In 1994, the Broad Marketing Association was incorporated in the State of Michigan and became Spartan Consulting in 1997.

“The ideal projects for Spartan Consulting are in the $5,000 to $15,000 range, with limited time commitments,” says Nason. “Sometimes it’s an entrepreneur who needs a business plan or a unit of a much larger entity, such as Whirlpool, IBM or Vlasic, that wants to solve a specific problem.”

Jon Wood (BA Marketing ’93, MBA ’05, ), current president of Spartan Consulting, says geography enters into the decision to take on new consulting projects, too. “We can handle long-distance projects, but if the work will involve frequent travel to the client, that usually doesn’t work well with our academic schedules.”

This year, 85 students are involved in Spartan Consulting — nearly half of the students in the Full-Time MBA Program. “We currently do not have enough projects to staff all of our consultants each year,” explains Wood. “So in order to give everyone opportunities for involvement, students who aren’t working directly in a consulting role actually manage business operations for Spartan Consulting.” As a result, the non-consultant members of Spartan Consulting get experience in running a small business, including managing the accounts receivable function, building a customer relationship management database, and other activities that ensure the efficiency and continuity of the organization.

Undergrads begin consulting for nonprofits

Just in the last two years, Broad School undergraduates have launched their own consulting group, Students Consulting for Non-profit Organizations (SCNO). The group, started by Jeffrey J. Thelen (BA Finance ’04), is actually a chapter of a national organization committed to improving local communities through pro bono consulting engagements for nonprofit organizations.

Thelen, who is now at Banc of America Securities in New York City in Healthcare Corporate and Investment Banking (See “Breaking in…,” page 16), says the impetus for forming the Broad School group came from a business leadership conference he attended while he was a student. “I was a member of the Finance Association, but I wanted to do something outside the classroom that gave me more responsibility than being an intern and also allowed me to help the community.”

The group caught on quickly and this year, under the leadership of Adam Hinman (BA Accounting ’05), the Broad School’s SCNO boasts 52 members and has accepted projects for Capital Area Youth Alliance, Leaders of Employee Development for Greater Excellence, Elder Law, Volunteers of America, Black Child and Family Institute, Lansing Jaycees and the Active Living for Adults organization. SCNO typically operates six to eight projects a semester, in groups of five to seven students, who assist nonprofits in areas such as strategic planning, marketing, Web site design, database development and financial analysis.

Hinman, who was among the students featured in recent ads for MSU in Crain’s Detroit Business, says that the group is just getting started. “We’re still fine-tuning our processes, but we now have an internal database of our results and evaluations. Recently our student members received intensive training from Accenture, covering topics from project and client management to understanding the business of being a nonprofit.”

Like Spartan Consulting’s Jon Wood, Hinman sees the value of the outside-theclass learning in individual terms, allowing members to hone time management, team-building and decisionmaking skills. “But we all recognize the immense responsibility we have in representing the Broad School when we make a commitment to a project,” he says. “Our personal reputations are on the line, but more than that, we are the Broad School to those organizations we are working with. We have to protect that for the next class of students coming through.”

To find out more, visit Spartan Consulting on the Web at spartanconsulting.org/ or Students Consulting for Non-profit Organizations at msu.scno.org/.